What is Johannes Hans Daniel Jensen known for?
I am best known for developing the nuclear shell model, which I formulated independently alongside Maria Goeppert Mayer in the late 1940s. This model explains the stability of certain nuclei—those with specific numbers of protons or neutrons called magic numbers—by proposing that nucleons occupy discrete energy shells within the nucleus, analogous to electron shells in atoms. The key insight was the inclusion of strong spin-orbit coupling, which splits the energy levels and accounts for the observed magic numbers: 2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82, and 126. For this work, we shared half of the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics. My contributions also include detailed analyses of nuclear binding energies and the systematic classification of nuclear states, which I published in works like *Nuclear Shell Structure* and *Elementary Theory of Nuclear Shell Structure*.
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